Watching the portfolio screen until my eyes went blurry I sat down on Saturday morning with a cup of lukewarm coffee, intending to finally sort out the mess I had made of my brokerage account over the last two years. It started small. I bought a few shares of some tech giants because everyone said…
The Allure of US Semiconductor Stocks When I look at my portfolio, it’s a mix of regret and calculated risks. Everyone talks about US semiconductor stocks as if they are a guaranteed path to wealth, especially with the AI hype surrounding Nvidia or the broader Nasdaq performance. But after actually going through the motions of…
Watching the numbers jump around on my phone I think I spend too much time staring at the flickering numbers on my broker’s app lately. It started when I kept hearing people mention these specific tickers at dinner parties—you know, the usual suspects like AMD or Nvidia. I don’t really have a master plan. I…
Watching the numbers shift overnight I spent a good chunk of my weekend staring at a brokerage app. It’s strange how seeing those red and green arrows flickering can make an otherwise quiet Saturday feel unnecessarily heavy. My portfolio, if you can even call it that, is mostly a mix of domestic blue chips I’ve…
Trying to calculate the snowball effect in my head I spent an hour yesterday staring at an online calculator, trying to figure out if my pension savings account, the one I set up for my tax deduction, is actually doing anything useful. Everyone talks about the magic of compound interest—the snowball effect, where your money…
Getting stuck in the math of my TMF holding I really thought I understood the math when I first started buying TMF. It felt straightforward enough—a triple-leveraged bet on 20-year US Treasuries. I bought in at 54 dollars, dropping about 9 million won, thinking that if rates just budged in my favor, the math would…
When the exchange rate becomes the main hobby I started buying US stocks about two years ago, back when everyone was talking about Vanguard ETFs and how stable they were compared to holding cash in a savings account. At the time, I thought I was being really calculated. I’d watch the dollar exchange rate like…
Getting lost in the sea of ticker symbols I remember when I first opened my brokerage account, thinking it would be simple. Everyone kept talking about SPY and VOO like they were holy grails of passive investing. I spent hours reading about how the Dow Jones index lost almost all its original constituents over fifty…
Watching the numbers shift on my screen I remember when I first opened my brokerage account to buy US stocks. It felt like I was entering a completely different world compared to the local KOSPI. Back then, I was obsessively checking the price of Tesla whenever I had a free moment between meetings. It was…
Starting with VTI and the noise of YouTube I remember when I first decided to look into overseas stocks. It was mostly because of those YouTube videos that kept showing up in my feed—people talking about how they retired early just by putting money into a simple VTI ETF. It sounded so clean, so logical….
Tracking the ticker while making coffee It started when I noticed the exchange rate creeping up past 1,300 won again. I used to just check it once in the morning before heading out, but lately, I find myself refreshing real-time exchange rate sites while waiting for my coffee to brew. It’s annoying because nothing really…
Watching the numbers shift on my phone screen I remember staring at my banking app last Tuesday, feeling like I was waiting for something that was never going to land in my favor. It’s funny how, when you’re about to travel or just dealing with some offshore account stuff, you suddenly become an amateur economist….